Historical Overview of U.S. Signals Intelligence Agencies and Their Expansion

155 Western Union, which has the telegraph monopoly in America, to provide the Black Chamber with all the telegrams coming into the United States. “Its far-seeking eyes penetrate the secret conference chambers at Washington, Tokyo, London, Paris, Geneva, Rome,” Yardley wrote about the Black Chamber. “Its sensitive ears catch the faintest whispering in the foreign capitals of the world.” But in 1929, at the instructions of President Herbert Hoover, Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed the Black Chamber saying famously “Gentlemen should not read each other's mail.” The moratorium did not last long. With war looming in Asia and Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt reactivated the operation as the Signals Security Agency. It proved its value in breaking the Japanese machine-generated cipher “purple.” In June 1942, using deciphered Japanese messages to pinpoint the location of the Japanese fleet at Midway; America’s won a decisive naval victory in the Pacific. Germany’s Enigma encoding machines, with three encoding wheels, proved more of a challenge. Initially British cryptanalysts led by the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing succeeded in building a rudimentary computer to decipher German messages to its submarines and bombers, but, in 1942, Germany added a fourth set of encoding wheels, escalation what essentially was a battle of machine intelligence. The US Navy then contracted with the National Cash Register Company to build a computing machine capable of breaking the improved Enigma, and, in May 1943, it succeeded. By the time the war ended in 1945, the US had over one hundred giant decryption machines in operation. This unrivalled capability to read the communications of foreign nations, which remained one of America’s most closely guarded secrets, was transferred to the Army Security Agency based at Fort Meade, Maryland. Then, on October 24, 1952, President Harry S. Truman, greatly expanded its purview and changed its name to the National Security Agency. The NSA was given two missions. The first one was protecting the communications of the US government. The main threat to breaching U.S. government channels of communications was the Soviet. The second one was intercepting all the relevant communications and signals of foreign governments. This latter mandate included the governments of allies as well as enemies. The President, the other intelligence services and the Department of Defense deemed what was relevant for national security. Even though the NSA remained part of the Department of Defense, its job went far beyond providing military intelligence. It also acted as a service agency to other American intelligence services. They prepared shopping lists of foreign communications intelligence and the NSA fulfilled them. As the Cold War heated up in the 1960s, the NSA provided intelligence not only to the Pentagon but to the Department of State, Central Intelligence Agency, the Treasury Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the FBI. With a multi-billion dollar “black budget” hidden from public scrutiny, the NSA’s technology directorate invested in state-of-the-art equipment, including super computers that could break almost any cipher, antennae mounted on geosynchronous satellites that vacuumed in billions of foreign telephone calls and other exotic capabilities. It also devised stealthy means of breaking into channels that its adversaries believed were secure. This enterprise required not only an army of technical specialists capable of HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020307